


In Blackout & Gold

by aeli_kindara



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Bucky Barnes & Peggy Carter Friendship, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Captain America: The First Avenger, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, PTSD, Peggy is a good, Post-Battle of Azzano (Marvel), World War II, brief Bucky/OMC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 17:15:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18921493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: The thing is, he approves of Peggy Carter. He approves of her viciously, whole-heartedly; he approves of her like he’s gripping down on razor wire, holding tighter the more he bleeds.





	In Blackout & Gold

**Author's Note:**

> This little monster started as a flashback aside in another fic and became, well. This.
> 
> Warnings for torture, PTSD, and a whole barrel full of angst.

### 1.

He’s strapped to a gurney. Green lights flicker overhead, wheels rattle. The leather at his wrists won’t yield.

Zola is speaking as he walks, brisk German Bucky only half-understands. “... _white male, American, twenty-five years old —_ ” which is wrong, he’s twenty-six; Steve is twenty-five, by now, or should be. There are immense domed lights overhead, on long mechanical necks, and when they flare to life they’re so bright he nearly vomits; his breath keens. The drug in his veins doesn’t like light. Doesn’t want it anywhere near.

“Sergeant Barnes,” says Zola, in heavily accented English, “you should rejoice; you are part of a beautiful future.” There’s a needle in his hand, one that looks big enough for a horse. “Relax, please. This one will make you happy.”

He feels it enter the meat of his shoulder, and keep going. He screams.

\---

Until Azzano and the events that follow, Bucky’s never spent a day of his life in a hospital bed.

It’s always Steve in hospitals, Steve getting wheeled into sanitized rooms where Bucky can’t follow. Steve smiling up at him in the sick ward, wan and sweaty and fucking beautiful, even with his skin gray as old laundry. Steve asking why Bucky didn’t bring his homework: _Jeez, Buck, I’ll never finish school if I let this stuff slow me down._

You have to be fucking fearless, loving Steve.

\---

Happy isn’t the word for it. _Happy_ is that Steve is somewhere safe from this maybe, walking a girl down the Coney Island pier, painting in their little apartment in a shaft of light. _Happy_ is that Bucky’s father has cataracts and his sisters are sisters and none of them will ever get sent to war. This is —

This is death, or something like it. Absence. He feels the lights burn his retinas, and doesn’t care. He feels the incision, the laceration, and listens to them discussing observations, recording notes — _accelerated healing, response to traumatic injury, white blood cell count._ His body is open to the lights, and he can see it, its colors: the gaudy red, the sick green-white.

He wants Steve.

Steve is the opposite of not-caring. Steve is self-serious shithead intensity, all bloody noses and moral stances and — and being the best fucking person Bucky knows, Jesus. He can’t not-care all the way, not with Steve out there somewhere kicking some bully in the nuts, and Bucky’s laughing — laughing on their table with their clamps in his skin, laughing at —

_The first time they, did that, giddy in the aftermath of a fight. Blood caked to Steve’s cheek and a damp cloth in Bucky’s hand, in the narrow bedroom with no space for all four of their knees; they’re crammed together, laughing, until Bucky reaches out to seize Steve’s chin and hold it still. Only he misses and his thumb ends up on Steve’s lips and he can’t quite pull it away, and they’re kissing, tumbling back onto the bed like the most natural thing in the world; laughing their way pantsless, instinctive, and Steve reaching down_ there _and Bucky gasping something dumb like_ watch the jewels, Rogers, I know your style —

“The anesthetic is unstable,” says Zola. “Another dose.”

Bucky keeps laughing until he forgets what made him start.

\---

The date is October 24th, 1943: the day they take him under. He’ll remember that, later; place it in the box of precious certainties he keeps locked up in his head. He pulls them out one by one, sometimes, to stay grounded; or else in trios: _name, rank, serial number._ Birthdates, his mother’s, his sisters’. Brooklyn, Yonkers, Bridgeport, New Haven, Paramus — those make him smile, the homes of the alias Steves.

Steve himself is no certainty. Bucky’s known that for years; any rainstorm could send him home crippled with pneumonia, any flight of stairs could stop his heart. You have to learn to be fucking fearless, loving Steve, because he sure as hell won’t wait for you to get over how tiny and bird-boned he is before throwing himself into a back-alley fistfight. And Bucky has learned, he’s learned plenty, but he’s not fearless. Not at the core of him; not even a little bit.

\---

He forgets a lot, as time goes, which he guesses is what they want. That and the healing and the strength — they shock him with electricity one day and he nearly breaks his bonds, sends Zola reeling back panting, _good, good!_ and smoothing his sparse hair back into place. They chart his progress in graphs on the wall. They set him rattling around his own brain, a loose part, and there are days when he can’t quite trace his own name.

He remembers Steve, though. Steve is the newsreel on a loop in his head, the safe and sunny place at the heart of him, and he knows who he is, sort of, because of it — knows that he loved Steve and knows that he didn’t deserve to. Maybe with him gone Steve will find a nice girl, finally stop ducking the issue. That’s good, he thinks. That makes him smile.

He owes it to someone, though, to remember other things, and so he tries. “ _Three two five five,_ ” he says, to empty rooms. “ _Seven zero three eight —_ ”

And Steve is there. His perspective must be wrong, because Steve is bigger, enormous, but Bucky smiles all the same, because he _loves him._ Jesus, he does, and how great is that? Steve is here and Bucky’s never been happier about a goddamn thing in his life. Three two five five, seven zero three eight —

“I thought you were dead,” says Steve.

That’s funny. Bucky tells him, “I thought you were smaller.”

Later, when he’s sober and earthbound and he’s watched Steve leap fifty feet through explosions of fire and he understands it’s _real,_ he’s less happy. It’s one thing, Big Steve showing up in a drug-addled rescue fantasy; it’s another that he’s here in the flesh. Too much flesh. It just figures that Bucky went to war and Steve waltzed into one of those operating rooms and let them change him, finally. Offered up his body and his soul.

Steve’s in it, now, and he’s getting out the exact same way the rest of them are: victorious, dead, or insane.

“It was Howard Stark who ran the project,” Steve tells him, on the march the next day, which doesn’t make Bucky feel a whole lot better, remembering that flying car. “And Colonel Phillips and a scientist named Abraham Erskine, and this dame Peggy — Agent Carter.”

He flushes as he corrects himself. Bucky raises his eyebrows, and nudges Steve with an elbow to the ribs. Familiar gesture, two bodies all wrong. “Agent, huh?” he says.

Steve turns a darker red. “It’s not like that. Besides, I think she and Stark, uh. You know.”

“Sure,” says Bucky, but he knows different, from the moment the woman in question steps out from the ranks of soldiers waiting to greet them. There’s steel in her spine and a fire in her eyes and he recognizes it — the relief that burns there, the faith. She’s gone for Steve like Bucky’s gone for Steve.

_Well,_ he tells himself, as he leads the cheer for Captain America; as they stand there too close, staring at each other, as the men whoop and whistle — _well, you got your wish, Barnes. You went to hell and he moved on. Congratulations, pal._

 

### 2.

The return trip is a quick one, inconceivably quick after the long nightmare of captivity. Bucky sits on the plane and watches the two of them watch each other, all half-glances and frozen moments of awe. In stillness, they cross a continent at war.

Then they’re plunged into the defiant carnival that is wartime London, a whole floor of rooms in a hotel that never sleeps. Bucky gets sent to the hospital — a second one, because Steve didn’t trust the first — for medical clearance. They tell him what he already knows: that he’s as fit as a man can be.

They also ask questions the other doctors didn’t — does he have bad dreams? Does he feel overwhelmed with panic, sometimes, or lose his capacity to make decisions? Does his hearing ever betray him for no apparent reason? Do his eyes?

_No,_ he says, straight-faced, to every one.

He thinks they might call his bullshit. They don’t. So he goes back to loitering around the hotel, evading invitations to bars. He likes to take himself and a pack of cigarettes up to the roof; it’s quiet up there, dirty and abandoned, with a long view of the ravages of the Blitz. Down on the streets, you can almost pretend it never happened — the ruined buildings blend into the background, masked in a sea of rowdy soldiers and hookers, music and laughter and sound.

\---

The thing is, he approves of Peggy Carter. He approves of her viciously, whole-heartedly; he approves of her like he’s gripping down on razor wire, holding tighter the more he bleeds. He thinks he’d approve of her in any circumstances — she’s definitely the first person he’s ever met who might be genuinely worthy of Steve — but as it is, there’s no contest. There’s no future that leads through the fractured, fucked up icebox that is Bucky’s brain.

But he’s also weak — so fucking weak — and he _wants._ Lies awake at night and thinks of sticky summer evenings in Brooklyn, windows flung open to tempt any hint of a breeze; of Steve, still little then and stripped nearly naked against the heat, catching Bucky watching him. Sauntering over to straddle Bucky’s thighs, and kissing him, in the way Bucky always knew he couldn’t _expect,_ shouldn’t _want,_ but God, he did. He thinks of the way their skin felt together, those nights, and he thinks of biting down laughs and shushing each other lest the neighbors out on the fire escape hear. Muffling gasps against Steve’s sweat-slick skin.

Sometimes, the fantasies bleed into his nightmares, and it’s Steve straddling him on Zola’s table; Steve nipping and kissing and teasing while Bucky tries to warn him, _no, he’s coming, he’ll find you and turn you into a weapon too._ Because the Steve in his dreams isn’t one, not yet, but Bucky can never move his limbs, can never make his voice sound. He usually wakes up from those dreams with his lungs burning, too paralyzed to scream, and his cheeks stiff with tears.

There are a few things that Steve has told him about Erskine’s serum: that it amplifies whatever is in a person to start with. That Erskine must have thought Steve good enough, at his core, to chance using his precious concoction on a walking 4F — Steve always says that with an air of bewildered happiness, and Bucky doesn’t quite answer, _no shit, pal_. That it had the opposite effect on Schmidt, making him crueler, more ambitious, than ever.

Bucky hasn’t told Steve much about his own injections, or the connection he’s made between them. Hasn’t told him anything, really, just that he doesn’t feel any different, he can’t remember — but he can, and he does. If the serum’s turned Steve into even more of bloody-minded do-gooder than he was to start with, it must have made Bucky more himself, too, and that’s why he feels this way: misshapen and monstrous, skin too full of different selves, all too jagged to fit without tearing his insides to shreds.

More than once, Steve’s tried to reach out and draw this new Bucky into his arms. Bucky’s always stepped back, sharp and stiff and unyielding, and let Steve watch him with wounded eyes until one of them looks away.

Steve always looks away.

All the better. He needs to look, until he finds Carter watching him, until he gets what that means. And Bucky needs to — to —

He needs to stop polluting Steve’s life like this, but when Steve asks him to join up with the new unit, he can’t quite say no. He can’t quite imagine leaving it to someone else to cover Steve’s six, and so he tells himself: just until the war is over. Just until then. “That little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight,” he says, and smiles into Steve’s eyes. “I’m following him.”

Then he makes his way to a bar down one of the dizzying side streets off Piccadilly, gets thoroughly blitzed, and fucks a guy in an alleyway, which does a pretty good job of making him feel even worse than he already did.

He’s too far gone to remember much about the deed itself, which he thinks is both a blessing and a curse. He wakes up the next morning a few blocks away, sprawled against the bombed-out wall of what used to be a church, and limps back to their hotel in the gray dawn light.

The sad thing is, it kind of works. It doesn’t make him happier, but it dulls the blade of his misery, makes it easier to smile and laugh and cover things up. He gets Steve and Peggy alone together whenever he can, makes himself scarce, teases them mercilessly. He attends the meetings and pores over the maps and strategizes with everyone else.

He thinks he’s passing it off just fine. That Steve’s swallowing it right along with the rest of them. Until, one night, Steve follows him downtown.

It really isn’t fair, Bucky thinks later, that a guy that big can be that sneaky. He understood when Steve was just a little waif of a kid — sure, at that size, he could practically float in and out of rooms on a breeze. Now, though — he shouldn’t be able to tail anyone with so much apparent ease. He certainly shouldn’t be able to tail _Bucky._

Those are all thoughts that come later, though. The one in the moment — as Bucky’s letting some big anonymous blonde soldier, Canadian he thinks, shove him against the back alley wall; as he’s choking down the feeling in his throat of _wrong wrong wrong;_ as there’s suddenly a hand on the guy’s shoulder, another fisting in his shirt, hurling him aside — is exactly what he says out loud: “ _What the fuck, Rogers?_ ”

It takes Steve a long minute to respond. He stands there chest heaving, hands balled into fists, as Bucky’s would-be fuck gets to his feet, evaluates his chances against Steve for a moment, then trips away, limping. Steve doesn’t turn to watch him go. Bucky’s still breathing hard, mouth swollen, shirt collar askew, and he straightens it and says again, “What the fuck?”

It’s only then that he realizes, with absolute gut-clenching horror, that there are tears in Steve’s eyes.

“I thought you,” says Steve, “I thought — I wasn’t your type anymore. With the, the muscles, and. But it’s not that. It’s —”

He stops talking. Bucky stares.

Steve looks fucking crushed.

The wall is cold and rough at his back. Bucky leans against it and closes his eyes, trying not to let out a hysterical giggle. “Jesus Christ,” he says, out loud; “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“ _Bucky,_ ” says Steve, and Bucky surges forward to kiss him, hard. Steve makes a surprised noise in his throat and then his hands are on Bucky’s ribs, on the back of Bucky’s neck, shaking and clutching and running over him like he needs to trace every line of Bucky’s form, needs to draw him in pressure and touch; like Bucky might disappear if he can’t. “Thought you were,” he gasps into Bucky’s mouth, “ _dead,_ Jesus,” and Bucky kisses him harder instead of dealing with that.

They wind up in a room at a nearby inn, because the hotel is too full of people they know and Steve flat-out refuses to fuck him in that alleyway. By the time those words have penetrated his consciousness Bucky’s too dazed with want to think better of it; he follows, follows. Inside the door, Steve pauses, suddenly careful, to ask, “Is it — did they —?”, which makes Bucky groan, “ _No,_ Christ,” and drop to his knees to take Steve’s mind off any questions like that for a good long while.

The thing is of course that he loves this. Hasn’t had Steve like this in _too fucking long,_ and never this Steve, who quivers with the effort of not bucking into his throat with all his considerable strength. He smells the same, though, and tastes the same, and the way the thick head of his cock fills up the back of Bucky’s throat is perfect, fuckin’ perfect, which he tries to tell Steve before remembering that his mouth’s too full to speak.

“Buck, Christ, Bucky,” Steve keeps murmuring in a steady stream, fingers light and desperate in Bucky’s hair. He touches him like his skull is made of glass, which it maybe is, and Bucky growls low in his throat and swallows Steve _deeper,_ too deep, he’s choking, but it’s worth it when Steve cries out and comes.

It takes a while for them both to come back from that, dazed and giddy and soaked in sweat. When they do, Steve’s slumped down to sort of sit in Bucky’s lap, almost like he’s been imagining but this Steve is way bigger, of course. He keeps smoothing Bucky’s hair behind his ears, petting him almost, and Bucky thinks they’re done until Steve pushes him gently onto his back and works his trousers down his thighs and rides him, opening himself up sweet and slow.

Bucky’s too wrung out to do much of anything to help, swamped in sensation, but Steve takes care of him, body rising and falling with powerful ease. Bucky watches half-lidded and lets his brain fuzz out white with bliss and thinks he could, he could get used to this.

After, tucked into the bed and with Steve’s arm a heavy weight across his chest, his peace fades. He’s done the thing he’s been swearing to himself he wouldn’t; he’s gone and stood in the way of Steve’s happiness, again. All it took was one lousy fucking fistfight. Not even; no one landed a single punch.

He’s too tired to run, then. He lets himself have this, fades into unconsciousness with the warmth and the familiar smell and the steady breathing of Steve beside him. In the morning, he slips free of the sheets and stands there for a moment, watching Steve's face; shifts the blackout curtains just wide enough to see him clearly. He leaves before the shaft of light that filters between them has crawled far enough down the wall to turn Steve’s hair to gold.

\---

Bucky’s on the roof, smoking a cigarette, when Peggy Carter finds him.

The door squeals loudly on its hinges as she opens it, sending up a puff of dust. Carter frowns at the cloud that envelops her, but she doesn’t cough, just smooths it off her skirt and closes the door behind her with a bang.

She turns to face him. Bucky lets out a long exhale of smoke.

“You aren’t fit for combat,” Carter says.

Bucky’s lungs stop working mid-breath.

They remember themselves a second later, and he hacks awkwardly at the smoke still caught inside them, gasping for air. Carter waits. She’s right; he knows she’s right, that he’s up half his nights screaming, that his thoughts come slower and his balance steps out from under him sometimes. That doesn’t make the dread any less inside him — waiting useless at home for Steve to get delivered in a wooden box. He can’t, he _can’t,_ he has to convince this dame somehow not to pass her thoughts along to Colonel Phillips. If she hasn’t already. He _has_ to stay.

“Neither is Dugan,” Carter adds, calmly, when he seems to have finished his coughing fit. “Or Morita, or Jones, or Dernier. Falsworth — seems to be, if only because no one can quite tell whether his unique set of neuroses represent any kind of deviation from his baseline. Steve isn’t. _I’m_ not.”

Bucky stares at her. His neglected cigarette burns his fingers, and he drops it with a start.

“I’m not here to tell you to abandon him, Sergeant Barnes,” Peggy Carter says softly.

He swallows. His voice comes out scratchy. “Why are you here, then?”

She comes over and sits. “May I?” she asks, and it takes him a moment to realize she’s reaching for a cigarette; he nods mutely and hands one over, then offers her a light. She does cough this time, delicately — even her cough is fucking perfect — and drops her hand to her knee, looking out across the city. The sky is flat gray, just hazy enough for the sun to glare through.

“I’m here,” she says, “because none of us are ready for this, and we’re doing it anyway. And because I love Steve. And because — bollocks, I don’t know how to say this, I'm just chasing it around. Because he _needs_ you. And _I_ need you, I need him to have you and I need — someone else who’s worrying about him _all the time,_ which you are. Thank God. And because none of us are going to survive this fucking war if we don’t do it together.”

Bucky sits there stunned.

“And I think you need us, too,” she says, more quietly. “Steve, and — and me. I —”

She stops short, drawing in a breath. Squints at the sky. Somewhere far off, pigeons swirl over a rooftop, and settle again.

“I’m going to tell you something classified, Sergeant Barnes,” she says abruptly. “You shouldn’t know this; Steve doesn’t. If you mention it to anyone, I’ll be in a good deal of trouble. Tell me you understand.”

Bucky swallows. He says, “I understand.”

“I was the agent who recovered Abraham Erskine from Johann Schmidt’s castle,” Carter tells him. “I was undercover there for several weeks in 1940. I knew Schmidt, and I knew Zola. I witnessed his early attempts to replicate Abraham’s work.”

Bucky’s pulse speeds, stutters. “You know what he did to me.”

She shakes her head. “I know what he _wanted_ to do to you, which means I know he failed. Beyond that — I know you’ve suffered, more than you want Steve to see. I know that that’s bone-headed of you. I know he’d move mountains for you, if you asked.”

He can’t help it; his mouth quirks. “Then you know why I don’t ask.”

“Well, yes. But it’s still stupid.” She sounds genuinely put out.

Bucky looks down at his hands. He lights another cigarette and puffs briefly, then watches it smolder. He says, “I don’t know what you’re offering.”

Carter snorts. “I’m not offering anything. I’m _asking,_ very selfishly I might add, that you —” She stops short, breathes out hard through her nose in annoyance. “We’re so delicate about these things, you know that? But when we’re _not,_ we don’t say them any better; for instance, I could tell you to please keep on fucking him —” Bucky swears, body jerking, and burns himself a second time — “but that’s not quite it either. He’s in love with you, and I believe it’s mutual, and _I’m_ rather in love with him, which I think might also be mutual — don’t tell him that, please, I’m annoyed at him at the moment — so why don’t we all just — carry on accordingly?”

It’s the most demented speech Bucky’s ever heard. His hand smarts where he burned it. “You’re crazy,” he tells her.

She nods graciously, but there’s a flinty look in her eyes. “So I’ve been told.”

Bucky has to make sure he’s heard this right. “You think we should — share.”

“That’s much more succinct than what I said. Yes.”

Shit. Jesus. He doesn’t know what to do with the emotions roiling in his gut, hope and fear and dumbfounded admiration — this lady has brass balls on her, Christ. And she walked right into Schmidt’s lair and out with Abraham Erskine. Alone.

She and Steve make a terrifying pair. He’s somehow signing on to look out for _both_ of them.

“I’m scared,” he says, “all the time.” Somehow, he doesn’t mind admitting that to her.

Carter says, “Yes.”

“I’m — I can’t look after him like I used to. The rules all changed."

“Yes.”

Bucky sighs. It was always going to come to this, wasn’t it. He rises, brushes cigarette ash off his trousers, and extends one hand, formal. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Agent Carter.”

“Sergeant Barnes,” she agrees, and shakes it. Her grip is firm.

He finds his mouth curling into a crooked smile. “Bucky,” he corrects her. “If we’re gonna be — partners, and all.”

“Partners. I like that.” Her lipstick is a deep red. It stands out, when she smiles, against the white of her teeth. “You may call me Peggy.”

 

### 3.

From his perch in a snowy spruce, Bucky can see every inch of the battlefield. The back door to HYDRA’s bunker: there. The open space in front of it, just large enough to three-point-turn a Tesseract-powered tank. The concrete walls, half blanketed in snow, that dip into the earth. The fresh one-way footprints, three sets of them, leading up to the door.

Dernier. Peggy. Steve.

Calling it a battlefield isn’t quite accurate, not yet. The air is still. Somewhere in the woods, a bird calls. The branch Bucky’s perched on digs into his thigh.

The watch on his wrist counts down. _Three, two, one._

Falsworth’s explosion rocks the forest — diversion, right on time. A roosting grouse explodes from the tree next to Bucky’s, but he doesn’t flinch. Snow showers from swaying branches, pockmarking the clean white surface of the forest floor.

Thirty more seconds. Forty-five. Fifty. And the blast doors creak open; men are yelling, shouting instructions in German and pointing to snow-blanketed vehicles. They trample the tracks in the snow without noticing them - they’ve been safe in their hidey-hole too long, these men. Bucky smiles grimly. Good.

Their commander is pointing now toward the plume of smoke rising off to the north; his men are shouldering guns, swinging into Jeeps, sweeping the snow clear of windscreens. Bucky’s finger is ready on the trigger. He waits, waits.

There’s only one tank at this bunker — small fry, compared to other HYDRA bases they’ve raided. A soldier wrenches open its hatch and drops inside.

A moment later, he comes flying out again, head flopping limp on his neck.

Dum-Dum’s work. Blue lights flare; the tank’s gun raises. Power whirrs as it swivels.

The soldiers are frozen, stupefied at their technology’s betrayal. In his tree, Bucky doesn’t grant himself the luxury of movement, but he does let his mouth curl in a thin smile.

The first Jeep gets blasted into smoke and shrapnel before the HYDRA commander can wipe the shocked expression of his face.

That’s Bucky’s cue. He aims, fires, and the commander won’t ever shut his mouth again, with a bullet hole through the back of his head. Bucky barely pauses to confirm the kill before swiveling to his next target, his next. The pop of his rifle is muffled, intimate, masked in the chaos below. The tank fires again as men swarm it — body parts fly — and Bucky picks a soldier off before he can climb his way inside. Men are screaming. Men are dying.

Killing people, Bucky thinks as he pulls the trigger, feels like it always has. Like detachment — a rift deep inside him, and on one side is the humanity of his enemy, but the other side is the humanity of his _friends._

They’ve nearly cleared the field before the second wave arrives.

It’s Peggy and Steve and Dernier, running like hell with flames billowing behind them; Peggy’s got a briefcase clutched tight in one hand. On their heels are HYDRA soldiers, more of them, and one of them’s raising a gun as he runs, aim jerking as he tries to sight —

Bucky picks him off cleanly before he’s clear of the blast doors. Steve raises a thumbs up, still sprinting, eyes searching out Bucky through the scope.

Bucky snorts. He kills the soldier hot on Dernier’s heels, then Peggy’s. Another, another, and they’re clear now, Dugan’s climbing out of the tank with a whoop —

A shot rings out, and it’s only Bucky’s flinch that saves him from getting his left radius cracked in two.

As it is, the bullet grazes him; blood flows freely from his arm. He looks down, and there’s a man in the snow below him, bloody and missing half of a leg. He must have crawled clear of one of the Jeeps; his arm wobbles crazily, but there’s a gun in it, leveling upward, and there’s nowhere Bucky can scramble to safety; his rifle’s too long to aim straight down, there’s no way to get out of sight —

For a moment, he’s frozen again, strapped to a table, watching a needle hover closer with helpless rage.

Peggy’s shot hits the man an instant before Steve’s shield does. He slumps back in the snow, a red stain growing around him.

Bucky sags in relief. Then he collects himself; the field isn’t clear yet. There could be more wounded hiding in the wreckage of the vehicles. He sets his eye to the scope again, checks carefully amongst each smoldering heap of twisted metal, but all he sees are limp body parts and blood.

“Bucky?” a voice is saying from far away. “ _Buck._ Get down from there. It’s clear. You need medical.”

He shakes his head. He should check again, in case something’s stirred. If a piece of debris is out of place —

“Bucky,” says Captain America, “you’re bleeding on my suit.”

He looks down again. It’s true, fat splashes of blood on the bright blue fabric at Steve’s shoulders. He frowns; he doesn’t like that. Steve shouldn’t be bloody, even if it’s not his.

“Sergeant.” It’s a new voice: a woman’s, someone he — Peggy. “Come down, now.”

And that’s when he knows he’s somewhere out of his own head. Slithering on his belly against rough bark, Bucky obeys.

He lands in the snow with a thump, unsteady on his own feet, and feels hands catch him. He looks down again, and there’s quite a bit of blood. “I want a sidearm,” he tells them, dazed. “Thigh holster.”

It’s Steve’s arms around him, he realizes, and Gabe running up with the medical kit. But Peggy’s the one cutting back his sleeve, reaching for bandages, swabs. “Anything you want, darling,” she promises. “Anything at all.”

\---

Steve comes to his tent that night, with fresh strips of linen and a bottle of whiskey and a dark, sober look in his eyes. He makes Bucky let him change his bandages before they do anything else, working by the light of the hurricane lamp, and then he cups Bucky’s head in both hands — one at his jaw, one at the base of his skull — and makes a study of kissing him.

He doesn’t stop until Bucky’s shaking beneath him. He doesn’t speak, either, but when Bucky leans his weight back in invitation, Steve follows. Lowers him to the bedroll and covers him up, slow sure hands dispensing with both their clothes, until they’re naked, every inch of them. Bucky shivers; he loves every Steve but he loves this Steve, always has, the quiet intensity and the bedrock of certainty, loves letting Steve make of him what he will.

Tonight, Steve draws his legs apart, wide; first one, then the other. Bucky closes his eyes and rides the sensation of exposure, as Steve settles between his knees; as he draws hands in wide strokes down Bucky’s chest, up his thighs, teasing closer. Bucky’s hips are already twisting with anticipation when Steve’s hand closes around his cock, and he chokes out an unsteady breath, not quite cursing aloud. Then Steve’s other hand is moving too, down and behind and pressing in, _in,_ until he stops and holds.

Little fucking tease; he always loved to make Bucky work for it, and Bucky’s never had an ounce of pride to refuse. He moans and rolls his hips, spun out at Steve’s fingertips, straw into gold.

Incrementally, Steve begins to rock into him. Bucky throws his head back, feels sweat on his chest, his face, and Steve’s fingertips are dragging ever-so-slightly over the places that turn his rational thought into roars of color and sound. Steve’s moving faster now, too, rhythm stumbling, and his breath makes a ragged sound that aches in Bucky’s own throat. He opens his eyes to find Steve gazing down at him with his lips parted, blood high in his cheeks, mesmerized; the love shines clear on his face.

“Steve,” Bucky says. It feels suddenly urgent, trapped here golden and safe between Steve’s hands; he writhes into them harder, sparks pleasure with a groan. “Steve, I — I think he was trying to make me like you. Like they made you.”

It takes two strokes for Steve’s mental faculties to catch up to Bucky’s words. Then he freezes, looking like he’s just taken a punch to the gut. He’s pulling out, leaving Bucky empty and aching; he’s sliding up Bucky’s body, hands on his ribs, pressing kisses to his bare skin like their warmth could drive the words away. Bucky pants and hip-checks him in protest — he _wants_ Steve’s hands where they are, damnit, and Steve bites Bucky’s lip and murmurs, “Okay, okay, shhh.” He slides his hand back down the cleft of Bucky’s ass before adding, breath hot and close, “Buck, I know.”

“But not —” Bucky grinds down into Steve’s fingers, losing concentration, and blinks, struggling for his train of thought. “Not more myself. Not like you. I think he was trying to make me not myself at all.”

Steve makes a small sound in his throat. His head sags on his neck for a moment, but when it comes up again, his eyes blazing. He buries his free hand in Bucky’s hair and surges against him, rutting their cocks together, and his fingers hit the place that sets off fucking explosions; Bucky _mewls._ “They _couldn’t,_ ” says Steve, stubble rasping against Bucky’s cheek as he lips his ear. “They fucking couldn’t. Not ever.”

They did, Bucky wants to tell him. They could, they almost did; _three two five five seven oh —_

“You’re Bucky Barnes,” says Steve, with teeth and hands and hips; “you’re _mine._ I’m yours. Neither of us can ever — not ever —”

And maybe they won’t. Maybe none of it needs to stop this, not Peggy, not the war, not Bucky’s haunted heart. He lets it take him — throws his head back and aches and thrusts and all but screams with it, rolling, while Steve buries sloppy kisses in his skin, murmurs streams of promises in half-breaths: “ _love you so much, Buck, never gonna let you go, not ever, love you to the end of the line_ —”

Bucky comes crying out, comes falling, and Steve’s falling with him, the altitude roaring in their ears. He’s always flown high, Steve has; maybe high enough that they’ll both grow wings before they hit the ground.

They shake together, to pieces and whole again.

For a moment — just a moment, in the center of everything — it’s almost enough to believe.

**Author's Note:**

> Have some history notes!
> 
>   * Psychiatric problems among soldiers were a major issue in both world wars; at the time PTSD had a variety of names but "combat exhaustion," "war neurosis," and "battle fatigue" were common ones. [This article](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/) has a good overview of the history of PTSD.
>   * One of the things I wanted to check for this fic was how plausible it is for Bucky to find random gay hookups in London in 1943. The answer: very! Per [One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military During World War II](https://books.google.com/books/about/One_of_the_Boys.html?id=SHGRxuaJ0F4C): "Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus were just hotbeds for gay bars.... In London, you could almost have sex twenty-four hours a day. Almost anywhere. Gay sex. And you could have straight sex too." (This whole book is full of fascinating info and quotes, if you want to know more.)
> 

> 
> Thank you so much for reading! <3


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